Dear Folks,
I’m even more than usually happy to be in my study this Sunday afternoon, with the Mozart oboe concerto playing in the background, and with another snowstorm beginning to gather outside. I’m simply delighted to be starting this letter to you about 30 hours later than I had intended to, and with no pain.
That’s because I spent last night in the hospital experiencing one of life’s great moments, the passing of a kidney stone.
I’d better back up and begin this story properly. Maybe with the flu that felled the household a week ago.
Don was the first to start coughing and bending over funny. This is a flu that grabs you first by the throat and then travels downward to your kidneys in a perfect imitation of lower back strain. Two days after Don started hurting, I came home with a temperature of 102 and put myself to bed, not to emerge for 24 hours. The thing comes on like a railroad train at full throttle. One minute you’re fine, the next minute you have a tickle in your throat and think you should take some vitamin C, the next minute you’re flat on your back with chills and fevers.
Just as I was beginning to totter around again, John walked in, announced, “I didn’t think I’d make it home,” and took to his bed. The following day it was Sylvia and Heather. That made 6 for 6 in our house. Sylvia’s mother Joyce, who was visiting us, braved the virus and was the only one standing firmly on her feet for awhile there.
Well, it was just a flu, nothing to write home about. I usually manage to stave them off with vitamin C or bounce back after 3 days, but I never did feel right after this one. A nasty cough settled into my bronchial tubes and wouldn’t quit. I felt light-headed, and my temperature didn’t quite go down to normal, and my kidneys still went into spasmodic pains.
It was a bad week to feel bad, because all sorts of stuff was happening at school. Bob Wilkinson was visiting from Budapest/California. For the past two years he has been heading up environmental education for the Central European University in Budapest, and now he’s coming home to, among other things, help Dennis and me run the Balaton Group — or so I hope, because I for one need his help. Bob generously spent two days with me, figuring out how to organize the next meeting and beginning to write invitation letters to possible speakers. I appreciated having Bob to talk with, and having his energy push. But by the time he left, I was so exhausted I went to bed. That was Wednesday night.
Thursday we had another visitor at Dartmouth, Faye Duchin from New York University, an input-output modeler trained by Wassily Leontief himself, a most interesting woman, and one of the possible speakers for the coming Balaton meeting. I had an exciting talk with her, went to hear her give a lecture, and then it was time to drive my students to the Pemigewassett River.
A terrific story has fallen right into the laps of my environmental journalism students! Over the mountains about an hour and a half drive from here the Pemigewassett River, known to its friends as the Pemi, drains straight south out of the White Mountains, through Franconia Notch and eventually into the Merrimack River. The lower Pemi, south of the National Forest, has long been an industrial river, dammed for power and stinking of sewage and paper mill waste. But since 1950 the water power users have modernized, and their dams have been neglected and breached. The paper mills have shut down. The towns have installed sewage treatment systems. The Pemi runs free and clear again, and some of the people who live along it want to keep it that way.
So about three years ago they started a process to list the Pemigewassett as a federal Wild and Scenic River. I’m just beginning to understand what that means. Apparently the Wild and Scenic River Act was originally meant as a way to protect rivers against stupid federal dams. (If you haven’t already done so, read Cadillac Desert for the awful history of the obsession our government has had, through the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, to put a dam in every possible place on every possible river.) The W&SRA permits citizens to petition Congress to designate a stretch of river forever free-flowing — no dams allowed. It creates a citizens’ committee to make a plan to protect water quality and recreational access — by requiring setbacks or creating greenways or boat landings, or whatever. The National Park Service implements the Act, though a Wild and Scenic River does not become a national park.
There are about 150 stretches of Wild & Scenic River in the country, most in the west. (Interesting statistic: 0.3% of the river length of America has been protected as Wild & Scenic; 17% has been drowned by dams.) There is only one other in New Hampshire, the Wildcat around Jackson higher up in the White Mountains.
Three years ago the environmentalists of the Pemi Valley got a Congressional mandate to start the W&SR planning process. The plan is now finished, and seven towns will vote in their town meetings next month on whether to approve it and designate their section of the river Wild & Scenic. And suddenly, out of nowhere, or so it seems, has come bitter, vicious opposition.
What has come is the first manifestation of the Wise Use Movement close enough for me to watch it first-hand. I’ve written about the Wise Use Movement; it is a right-wing, populist, property rights movement, opposing essentially anything government does, but especially opposing anything that might interfere with that sacred “man’s right to do what he wants with his land.” I have a file six inches thick about the Wise Use Movement — how it enrages the timber cutters of the Northwest against the protectors of the spotted owl, how it organizes trail bikers and other off-road vehicle users to gain access to public lands (funded by Honda and Kawasaki), how it fights to protect mining companies’ or cattle grazers’ rights to extract resources for ridiculously low fees on public lands — and how it shoots down Wild & Scenic River designations. There is a lot of money from timber, mining, grazing, and real estate companies behind all this. The Wise Use Movement coordinators have close ties with the Moonies, it is said. Dan Quayle has been one of their supporters. They think environmentalists are what the communists turned into when they stopped being communists.
So here they are, in the Pemi Valley! My students and I are covering the story. We’ve taken a lot of cold, snowy drives over the mountains to attend town hearings and strategy sessions.
I took the first scoping trip alone, when I happened to discover, about two weeks ago, that both the environmentalists and the Wise Use people were holding meetings on the same day. I dropped everything and went over, first to Concord, to the Forest Society’s headquarters, a place where I have been many times, and where I am well known.
Picture one of the most Environmentally Correct buildings in the world, standing in the middle of a nature reserve, the offices solar heated, with heat-retaining water walls, composting toilets, walls and railings and ceiling beams made of burnished native woods, each one labelled — white birch, hemlock, sugar maple. There, on that Friday afternoon, assembled the Appalachian Mountain Club, the Nature Conservancy, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Pemigewassett River Council. Well-educated, well-dressed, well-spoken folks, tending toward narrow-rimmed glasses and cashmere sweaters. Together they have tens of thousands of members, and they are trying to figure out how to get those who live in the seven towns to turn out on Town Meeting Day.
These environmentalists are worried. They’ve always been on the side of the angels; they’ve never been cast as black hats before. They’ve never been shouted down at meetings, or had all the snowmobile and hunting clubs suddenly go against them. They know the nation-wide record of Wise Use (environmental groups are finally communicating with each other, after getting hit one by one by Wise Use organizers.) They have hired one person full time just to keep up to date with all Wise Use movements in New Hampshire, and another person full time to organize a win on the Pemi. They’re planning telephone trees and letters to the editor. They have formidable resources on their side, but they’re estimating their chance of winning at 50-50 at best.
As I was leaving, I asked them what they thought motivated the other side. “I can’t explain them,” one man said to me. “We operate from love. They just operate from hate.”
Well, having heard that, it was with trepidation that I drove north an hour to Plymouth, where the New Hampshire Landowners Alliance (the local Wise Use name) rally was already in progress. Quite a contrast from the Forest Society’s environmentally perfect venue. Seedy restaurant in town. Pick-up trucks in the lot, some with painted sideboards: N.H. LANDOWNERS ALERT! THE GOVERNMENT IS AFTER YOUR RIVER PROPERTY! VOTE NO ON THE PEMI!
It was a heavy-set crowd, in heavy clothes and loggers’ boots. Mostly elderly, slightly raucous. Native sons and daughters. Knew each other well, slapped each other on the back, and told lots of in-jokes. Just as I was coming in, one man was standing up and saying, with deep sincerity, “You know, we’re more than a political movement, we’re a FAMILY! We’re doing this out of love for our land, our river, and our way of life. And we’ve got to stick together.”
Well, I liked them a lot. I moved from table to table and heard their life stories. I found myself sitting next to all the nefarious characters I had heard described by the environmentalists: the imported agitator from Chicago, the woman who’s the local organizer, the man who owns the Livermore Falls hydro site and wants to put in a dam (he has the generators already stored in a warehouse up at Littleton, but he’s given up, because “I just can’t stand to deal with the government any more.”) They are much less well educated than the environmental-types (many admitted to never finishing high school), but they’re all well off, owners of lumber companies and contracting companies and gun shops and print shops and car dealerships and lots and lots of land. Except for the imported agitators, they are simple, hard-working, proud and independent people who are living about a century too late. Their philosophy of self-reliance and local control is one I would like to believe in, but it only works when the ratio of people to nature is much, much lower than it is along the Pemigewassett River.
There was a lot of talk about the Founding Fathers. A lot of speculation about the real, undisclosed, nefarious, anti-capitalist conspiracy of the environmentalists. You’ve heard it all if you’ve listened to Pat Buchanan or Rush Limbaugh. They believe it, every word. They feel themselves the underdogs against the power of the government (even the TOWN government; every one I talked to had at least one bitter memory of a run-in with a town zoning law) and against the better-educated, fast-talking, yuppy, citified liberals who are coming into the state and trying to tie up all the rivers and snatch away hard-earned private property. “I own two miles of the Contoocook River,” said one man. “I love it when the fishermen come to fish, and when the canoes come through. But I’m going to post my land, ‘Closed to all members of the Forest Society, the Nature Conservancy, and the Appalachian Mountain Club.'”
Well, you get the picture. It’s a colorful battle, and one with nationwide significance, because in one form or another it’s going on everywhere. I am trying to get my students to cover it straight. (Their first instinct, like mine, was to presume the environmental side to be the good guys.) I now see it as a story of good folks tearing each other apart, splitting communities down the middle, demonizing each other, out of ideology, fear, and ignorance, manipulated skillfully by a few dangerous rabble-rousers. I think the environmentalists have dropped the ball by failing to make common cause with these local landowners long ago.
Both sides are in favor of clean air and clean water. That isn’t what the battle is about. The battle is about WHO DECIDES how to keep the air and water clean. The Wise Use people have cleverly gained the upper hand by turning the argument from “should our river be protected?” to “do you trust your government?” On that second question there’s no way on earth that the environmentalists can win.
So, it’s sad but fascinating to go to the open meetings in the various towns and watch them bash at each other. That’s what I did last Thursday night. Town of Ashland. About 40 people present, including me and 3 students, and 4 people from the environmental crowd and the “five thugs” from the New Hampshire Landowners Alliance (that’s what the other side calls them, of course.) My students were great. They fanned out and talked to folks, and on the ride home they read me their notes. (We’re working on being very, very observant.) “Did you see the guy spitting tobacco into the Dr. Pepper can?” “Did you know that of 38 people in the room, 29 had wool plaid shirts on?” “Did you know that the Christmas-tree farmer who spoke wasn’t even from Ashland?”
By the time I got home it was midnight and 20 below. I went to bed, coughing badly, and at 3 I woke up in terrible pain. I thought it must be appendicitis, but it was on the wrong side for that. I got up and took some aspirin. The pain got worse. I soaked in a hot tub for awhile. That made me feel better, but as soon as I got out, I threw up, though I hadn’t had time for dinner, so there was nothing to throw up. I writhed for awhile, making up all the dire things that might be wrong with me. (One’s imagination can get wild in those dark hours of the very early morning, but the one thing that never occurred to me was a kidney stone), wondering whether to drive myself to the hospital, remembering that it was 20 below, getting up for some more dry heaves. I decided that I wouldn’t call my nurse friend Elsa until at least 7 AM to ask her what to do. Finally, about 6, I fell asleep. When I woke up, the pain was gone! It was as if I had dreamed the whole thing!
So I went about my day, a bit gingerly, since I’d had little sleep. I didn’t feel great, but the absence of the pain was so wonderful I wasn’t going to complain. That evening we had a birthday party for Don. Sylvia’s sister Binky came with her husband Tim and 3-year-old Lucas and 2-year-old Shona. Karel and Stephanie came with 6-month-old Pavel. Four kids under the age of five! Lots of balloons and candles and a leg of lamb from the farm, peas from the freezer, home-made bread from Karel, a chocolate cake and a strawberry-rhubarb pie (strawberries and rhubarb from the freezer). I could hardly eat, but I had a great time, especially watching the beautiful kids.
The next morning, yesterday morning, I woke up and the pain was back. I tried to pretend it wasn’t there, but it was getting worse. I was shivering, no matter how much I put on, and getting nauseous and faint. It was still 20 below, but bright and sunny and I decided to head for the hospital. I had no trouble convincing the people there that I was very sick. They injected me with some dye for X-rays that put even more pressure on my kidney, and the pain went into the fifth dimension. I was writhing on the X-ray table and they couldn’t take pictures, so they finally injected some painkiller, and after that my troubles were over. I dozed through everything else, found myself checked into the hospital and being prepared for surgery. Just then something shifted somewhere, and the pain (which was apparent even with the painkiller) went away.
Well, they wouldn’t let me go home till today. So I had a long sleep and watched C-SPAN (which we don’t get at home). They tell me the stone is still there, just at the junction where the ureter hits the bladder, so I may have another session. This time I have the painkiller ready. I still feel light-headed and strange, but at least I’m at home!
It just started snowing hard. We already have a couple feet on the ground, and it’s supposed to snow all week. We are rejoicing! At LAST a real ski-winter! FINALLY this countryside looks the way it’s supposed to in February! The dogs roll in the snow, and snarfle their noses in it, and bite it, and come out snow-faced and grinning. The cats keep to the shoveled paths — the unbroken snow is way over their heads. The barn chicken snuggles her feet into the thick wool of our tolerant ram Wally, and the geese bed down around him. Don found one frustrated hen bunkered down in a hole in the snow, unable to proceed another inch, a newly laid egg under her! The pond is buried, so Heather can’t skate there any more, but her kindergarten class goes to skate every Friday on the KUA rink. Don, whose house-painting job has stopped again, goes with them. Sylvia, whose horse job is way over in Woodstock, tells us about her harrowing drives home on the country roads in the blizzards. John is down in Florida at the moment (aw, POOR John!) helping his mother pack up and move north.
I have a few pansies and stock and some celery sprouted in the south windows. Yesterday I had planned to start onions and petunias; well, in a day or two I’ll catch up.
This is just the kind of winter that sets you up to really appreciate spring!
Love,
Dana
